


Run

by veilchenjaeger



Category: W.I.T.C.H.
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Comic Universe, F/F, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-26 15:00:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5009203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veilchenjaeger/pseuds/veilchenjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set before and after Nerissa's betrayal. While everything is crumbling around them, Kadma and Halinor might at least find the courage to find each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bisexualcyborg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualcyborg/gifts).



> I originally wanted to write you Irma/Cornelia for Femslashex, but my inspiration kicked me in the face and screamed "Kalinor!"  
> So Kalinor it is.
> 
> I have never watched season 2 of the cartoon, so their characterisation is solely based on the comics.

Run. The yells of the guards ring in her ears. _Run_. She can almost feel the breath of their horses on her neck. Horses? No, not horses. Huge, slimy, green things with fangs. But they ride on them, so horses.

No time to think about this. No time to think about the way either. She leaps over a branch in her way, ducks under another and stops just in time not to crash into the violet glob of flesh that’s suddenly in her way. She takes a second to breathe, to thank the gods and everything that she saw it. She knows that every pore on its body is poisonous and could kill her within seconds.

Then, she turns left and runs. Her heels clack on the stone ground, her feet hurt from running in these shoes, her lungs are burning with the cold of the thin air, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t. The amulet is still in her tight, relentless grip, the one hot thing in this cold world.

She rushes past things she believes to be trees, jumps over a stream of something that could be water. Behind her, she hears shouting in a foreign language. It’s so loud her heart skips a beat. She didn’t know they were so close already, had hoped the thing in the way would hold them up.

She frantically turns her head, looking for something she could use to stop them. She doesn’t know which of these things are plants, so she needs to rely on the ground.

With all the strength she has left in her legs, she pushes herself from the ground and lands with all the force she has. Behind her, she hears the earth crumbling. She throws a quick glance back. The ground opens behind her, and behind that, they come. They’re red and their beasts of a toxic green. They see her, and she sees them – for a split second, their eyes meet.

Then, one of the horses steps over the cliff her magic has created and falls down into the abyss. Yelling fills the air, shouts and screams of pure rage.

She takes another turn, and they disappear behind the trees.

She can’t stop just yet, can’t rest her legs. They’re still behind her. It’s only a matter of time until they find out how to get past the abyss.

A glow in the gloomy mist catches her eye. Fire, she thinks, and a bolt of energy goes through her entire body. She speeds up, her steps become leaps now. Faster. She crashes through the trees, a branch hits her in the stomach and she coughs in pain.

But there she is. She has a flame in one hand and has the other extended, reaching out for her.

“Kadma! Take my hand!” she shouts.

The thunder of the hooves behind her is getting louder again. The guards shout into her ears, they’re so close now that she can smell their disgusting odour.

They break through the bushes just in the very second she grips Halinor’s hand. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the pink flash of the Heart, and they are gone.

White fills her vision. She drops to the floor and expects it to hurt, but it doesn’t. Only her lungs are still ice cold, and her heart is thumping against her chest. But when she finally opens her aching hand, out falls the amulet and stays there, on the ground as a burst of red and gold in the middle of all that white.

“We made it,” she hears someone gasp.

She looks up and is almost blinded by the light. The world they so hurriedly left had been grey, mist clouding her vision and thick, grey clouds hanging between the earth and the red sun. As colourful as the living things of that world are, its atmosphere is dull and monotone.

Now, she looks into Halinor’s blue eyes and her frowning face surrounded by a crest of golden hair. Halinor is crouched next to her, and now Kadma can feel the warmth of hands on her shoulders.

“Are you alright?” Halinor asks.

Kadma leans into her hands, slowly stroking up and down her back, and nods. Her eyes fall shut and she cannot get herself to open them again. Her lids are heavy as stone. Her whole body feels like it’s made of marble instead of flesh and bones, and it would need the strength of five to move her one single inch.

Behind her closed eyelids, she notes a shadow crouching in front of her, and the rattle of a chain tells her that someone must have picked the amulet up. It has to be Nerissa, she thinks, because Nerissa’s voice is the next that speaks.

“We’ve got the amulet,” she says, and she sounds so pleased and proud, as if it had been her who had outrun the guards. “It looks like there is no welcome committee yet, so who’s going to help me look for the Oracle?”

There is a moment of silence. Kadma would like to open her eyes and see what is happening. Maybe they are just nodding and looking at each other, or maybe Halinor has this glare again that she lately gets more often, whenever Nerissa goes too far. But Kadma is too tired, to worn-out to even look.

“Nerissa.” That’s Yan Lin’s voice, calm and quiet as always. Her words are almost too quiet to hear, she breathes them more than she says them. “I really don’t know if Kadma is okay.”

Another period of silence. This time, it takes longer, and with an inhuman effort, Kadma manages to open her eyes. Halinor is still next to her, still stroking her back, still holding her in an almost-embrace. Close, but somehow still not close enough. Cassidy is now sitting on the floor, directly in front of Kadma, and she wonders why she didn’t notice her. Yan Lin is standing behind her, her eyes fixed on Nerissa, who has the Heart in one and the amulet in the other hand and is now meeting Kadma’s eyes.

“How are you feeling?” she asks. She sounds concerned, yes, but a lot more impatient. Maybe, if she wasn’t so stone-tired, Kadma would be offended. She would throw words at Nerissa she would later regret, things about how she leaves them behind far too often and how it seems like she is slowly stopping to care altogether. But Kadma is too exhausted for such thoughts. All she wants now is to feel Halinor’s embrace a little longer, to let her friend cast out the cold the other world has left on her.

So she says, “I’m fine. You can go, if you want. I’ll just stay here for a moment.”

She searches for Halinor’s eyes to send her a plea to stay, but she doesn’t need to.

“I’ll stay with Kadma,” Halinor says pointedly. There is fire in her voice, and Kadma wonders where she takes it from. If it has anything to do with her powers, that even when everyone else is too deprived of their strength to even move, she still has energy.

“We all should,” Cassidy begins, looking up at Nerissa with her wide, innocent eyes. But Yan Lin cuts her off, offers her a hand and pulls her to her feet.

“No, Nerissa’s right, we should look for the Oracle. The sooner we settle this, the sooner we’ll be home.”

Cassidy hesitates. She makes a step back towards Kadma, but Halinor waves her off. “Go, we need to get her home, that’s the most important thing.”

Nerissa’s satisfied smile is the last thing Kadma sees before she closes her eyes again. The effort to keep them open has become too much, so much that her head falls back too and lands on Halinor’s shoulder.

The clatter of heels on the white floor fades in the distance, and the only sound that is left is Halinor’s soft breathing, perfectly in sync with the slight heaving of her chest. Her hand rubs circles on Kadma’s back, and her arms support her to at least partially stay upright. She smells of the fire she can hold in her hands and the perfume in the little pink bottle she keeps on the desk in her room.

“How do you really feel?” she asks, gently, quietly. “You can tell me.”

“I outran the guards of Memphalon,” Kadma hums. “What do you expect?”

Halinor chuckles at that. Her breath gusts over Kadma’s scalp, making her whole body shiver. “You shouldn’t have gone alone,” she says, and her sternness is back. “Nerissa shouldn’t have made you do that.”

“I know. Can we not talk about it now?”

They talk about it far too often, Kadma thinks. Usually, it’s her who initiates these conversations, because she cannot look Nerissa in the eyes anymore without thinking about the countless times her selfish decisions as a leader have brought them in serious trouble. And it’s Cassidy who ends the resulting fights, by reminding them that they are still a team and still belong together, that sometimes, friends fight or change, but that they always reunite in the end.

It’s been some months since the last time Cassidy had been able to truly convince Kadma of that.

Halinor, she thinks, Halinor could convince her. Halinor could convince her that the Earth was a disk and the moon was made of cheese, and Kadma would gladly be fed all these lies, if only they came from her lips.

But Halinor doesn’t lie to her. Halinor knows just as well as Kadma does that something is changing, has maybe already changed. They’re not the fourteen-year-old girls anymore who received their powers almost a decade ago.

Those worries alone exhaust Kadma more. She shifts closer to Halinor, who finally truly embraces her, and lets her mind drift off. Like this, surrounded by Halinor’s warmth and scent, it’s not hard to get lost in images. She has enough dreams to visit in these moments.

“I’d like to never talk about it again,” Halinor murmurs. Her lips are on top of Kadma’s head now. It almost counts as a kiss. If only Kadma could know that she meant it like that.

She leans closer and buries her face in Halinor’s neck and murmurs, “I don’t understand you.”

“I don’t understand you either,” Halinor murmurs back. “Especially not now. What do you mean?”

Kadma shakes her head and takes a deep breath. There is time to talk about everything later. Now, there is this moment to indulge in, and her tired bones to be cured. The rose scent is strongest on Halinor’s neck, she notices, and she breathes it in to let it drown out all her other senses.

_Why can’t we have this?_ Kadma wonders. _We’re losing everything around us, why can’t we at least have each other?_

It’s only when she feels Halinor’s embrace tighten and hears her low sigh that she realises she said it out loud. She is too tired to be bothered, too tired, apparently, to keep control over her own words and thoughts.

Halinor leans down and Kadma can feel her forehead press against her shoulder. “You know why,” she whispers. Something in her voice sounds broken.

It’s not the right time to discuss this, not after everything that happened today and Nerissa acting more and more strangely. But it’s important enough to awaken a tiny flame of energy in Kadma, and so she answers, if only to keep that flame nurtured.

“That’s why I don’t understand you,” she says. It’s more of a confession than anything she told her before. “You always say I’m the traditional one. The conservative one. But I’m the one willing to risk this.”

“Because you are also the one who is too stubborn to let anyone tell you what to do.” There is a tiny trace of amusement in Halinor’s voice, but it’s gone the next time she opens her mouth. “You know it would break my mother’s heart. When we’re out of Heatherfield, then, maybe… No, certainly, then we can do this. But not now.”

“We already did it once,” Kadma reminds her. She keeps those memories treasured, and every day she fears that she will lose the memory of how Halinor’s lips feel against hers. It never happens.

Halinor lifts her head again, and then she presses her lips to Kadma’s temple. “You know that I love you,” she murmurs, and it makes Kadma’s heart jump and break all at once to hear these words. “We decided it’s too dangerous right now, and I stand by that decision. Have you thought about Fadden Hills?”

Fadden Hills, yes, their big dream. There hasn’t been a day Kadma hasn’t thought about Fadden Hills. If only she could leave her studies, if only Halinor managed to transfer there for the next semester. Then they could move in together and be free to be whatever they wanted to be to each other, and nobody would bat an eyelash at it. Because two friends living together, why would that be anything unusual?

She tries to say something like this, but she trails off after “Fadden Hills”. Halinor’s laugh tickles her ears.

“You should sleep. I don’t know when they’ll come back, but we’ll wake you up.”

Kadma doesn’t want to think about the others returning, or about Nerissa’s boastful smirk whenever they succeeded in anything, even if the credits didn’t belong to her at all. She doesn’t want to think about not being able to kiss Halinor or how her own parents would react to that happening. So she casts it out of her mind and just stays like this.

She is blissful when she falls asleep, because if she can have nothing else, she can at least have this: A moment of peace and Halinor all around her.

-

A month and a half later, Cassidy is dead and Nerissa has been sentenced to eternal damnation. Yan Lin is on a plane to China, the Heart around her neck and tears in her eyes, and Kadma is sitting on the floor of her flat, holding a staring contest with a bottle of red wine.

“You don’t drink.” is the only thing Halinor says when she steps into the room.

“And you never use that key I gave you, and yet here we are.”

Kadma doesn’t bother to look up and watch Halinor cross the room. It’s almost as if she can feel her presence and her aura move towards her. It’s next to her now and Halinor is on the floor too, leaning against the sofa.

There is a trace of comfort in the fact that she can still sense Halinor. It wasn’t the powers, then, that gave her that ability.

Halinor takes the bottle from the table and looks at the label. It’s a cheap wine from the supermarket next door, but she doesn’t seem to care. “I was worried,” she sighs and puts the bottle down again.

Kadma doesn’t say anything, but lets her silence be answer enough. It’s too late to worry now. They should have worried a week ago, when the Oracle had taken the heart from Nerissa. Kadma hates the Oracle for what he did, because he knew Cassidy would die and did nothing, he saw what Nerissa had become and still let her commit a terrible crime. But they, Halinor and Yan Lin and herself, they had seen it too. They should have sensed the danger and stopped something. At least they should have been there to protect Cassidy.

But they had been too caught up in their own minds, too idealistic and too hopeful that things would get better with this change, to notice the threat Candracar’s decision had put on their best friend’s life.

With every passing day, Kadma’s loath at the Oracle becomes more and more secondary to a raging fury at herself.

It helps that Halinor is there with her, because she can look at her now and remind herself that Halinor, too, didn’t act when they should have acted. Halinor and Yan Lin both, and Kadma cannot blame them. So she should be gentle on herself.

Halinor rests her head against the sofa and stares up at the ceiling. Her long locks are pulled up in a ponytail, and the way it’s pulled between the sofa and her neck looks painful.

She glances at Kadma and murmurs, “I told my mother.”

“About what? Candracar?”

“Liking girls.”

For a moment, Kadma just gapes at her. The ticking of the terrible grandfather clock on the wall is an uncomfortable reminder of how long exactly she has been staring, but she cannot decide how to react. When the ticking finally yields to the sound of laughter, it takes her a second to understand that it’s her who is laughing.

She hasn’t laughed in over a week, and the muscles of her face hurt from the effort and her throat is sore from all the crying, but she can’t stop laughing. She drops her forehead onto her knees because she can’t hold herself upright anymore, and she laughs until finally one of her gasps becomes a sob and the miserable reality hits her like a brick in the stomach.

“I simply don’t understand you,” she rasps. Halinor has a brow arched up at her in something between amusement and concern.

“If it helps you, I don’t understand myself either,” she says. “I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I just have the temper because I’m Fire.”

Kadma winces. “You’re not Fire anymore,” she corrects. And she is not Earth anymore, and this is the way it should be.

Halinor just shrugs. “Maybe I was Fire because I have the temper, then.”

Then, Kadma thinks, she should have been Fire. Not patient, sweet Halinor, but her, stubborn, impulsive Kadma. It’s strange to her that she only wonders about this now, when it doesn’t matter anyways.

“How did it go?” she asks instead. She already knows, but she has to say something to stop thinking about what this development could mean.

Halinor rests her head on Kadma’s shoulder, and the tickling of her hair on Kadma’s neck is almost unbearable. “She said I was confused because Nerissa and Cassidy died. I should go to church and talk to the pastor, he might be able to show me the right path.” A gasping laugh escapes her throat. “I packed my things and left home.”

Kadma’s entire body tenses up. “You left home?” she asks, although she heard it well enough the first time. But Halinor leaving home, leaving her beloved mother behind, that’s not something she can imagine. Halinor always loved her family so much, and Kadma always thought she could never compete with that. After all, Halinor had already picked her family over their love once.

Now, though, now she is here and nods and giggles like she just told a silly joke. “My stuff is in the hallway, didn’t want to bring it in. Look at me, I’m a terrible daughter.”

“No, you’re not,” Kadma says. “Your mother is a terrible mother if such a little thing makes her suddenly not accept her daughter anymore.”

Her voice is stern, because she expects Halinor to disagree and somehow find a way to guard her mother, and she cannot allow Halinor to blame herself for something nobody should be blamed for. But when Halinor speaks up, it’s not about her mother at all.

“It’s not a little thing.”

Her voice is quiet and so gentle it sends shivers down Kadma’s spine. It’s as if her words have a magnetic pull, because Kadma sees her move out of the corner of her eye and all she can do is move too. She doesn’t linger to look at Halinor’s face like the people do in the movies – she knows every inch of it by heart; she knows her dimples when she smiles and the early wrinkles under her eyes. She doesn’t look. She closes her eyes and finds Halinor’s lips as if they had been doing this for their entire lives.

There is no want in the kiss, although Kadma feels it in every cell of her body. She wants to bury her hands in Halinor’s hair and pull her closer, she wants to taste her and feel her and consume her, because finally, she can. But there is no hurry, there is nothing they have to lose anymore, and now is not the time.

So Kadma takes in the warmth of Halinor’s soft lips on hers and stays like this until Halinor pulls away.

One look into Halinor’s eyes answers all the questions she still had. Halinor is smiling, only a little but enough for it to mean that yes, they can have this now. Maybe, Kadma thinks, they had to lose everything to truly find each other. Maybe that is just how they work.

“I can’t stay in Heatherfield,” is the next thing she says. “They’re everywhere in this city. It’s like their ghosts are never going to leave, even when they’ve been gone for years.”

Halinor stays silent and waits, until Kadma sighs and adds, “Yan Lin did the right thing. She just packed her bags and ran.”

“Well, I did pack my bags,” Halinor says.

It’s less of a conscious decision than an impulse. Kadma is on her feet within seconds, helping Halinor up. When they step into her bedroom, Kadma wonders for a moment what would happen if they would just fall onto this bed together now. If in the morning, they would decide to stay after all.

They don’t, though. There is always time later. After having lost everything, the only thing Kadma is sure of is that she will never lose Halinor. That they have all the time in the universe to spend with each other.

So she grabs a bag and they stuff in everything they think they might need. Then, they throw half of it out again and start over, until only the most important things are left. Shampoo. A toothbrush. An overnight bag full of clothes to change. Passport, ID, wallet. And amongst all the necessities, a postcard Cassidy sent them from Rome two years ago.

They only stop moving when they are in the hallway. Halinor’s bags are on the floor, and with Kadma’s next to them, it’s a portrait of all the change they lived through in the past years.

Their eyes find each other, and Halinor hesitates. “If we do this now, there is no going back.”

“And if we don’t, we’re never going to do it,” Kadma says, and that settles it.

They pick up their bags and leave the flat behind, where the ugly grandfather clock is still ticking and the bottle of cheap wine is still sitting on the table, untouched. They are out on the street, and the door falls shut behind them with an overwhelming finality.

“What now?” Kadma asks. “Fadden Hills?”

Halinor shakes her head. “No. Not now. Now we’re going…” She lets her sentence trail off and stares at the lamp across the street. It just switched on, just as the darkness of night creeps into the streets of Heatherfield.

“We’re just going somewhere,” she says.

“Sounds good,” Kadma says.

Then she takes Halinor’s hand in her own, and runs.


End file.
